Tag Archives: culture

If one needed any proof that the United States, and a good deal of the rest of the world has simply abandoned any pretense of being serious, the top stories of today and a few days prior are convincing proof.

Last night, the story broke that “Jihadi” John, the masked killer of at least five in Iraq and or Syria had been identified. Along with this came a presser by CAGE, a “human rights” organization in the UK, which attempted to blame the nation’s security services for “radicalizing” Mohammed Emwazi, who

Cage directer Asim Qureshi in a diptych with the “beautiful young man” who went on to practice halal butchery on humans. Qureshi’s zabiba(prayer bump) should be a dead giveaway that he’s just another of the lying Islamic shills to whom Westerners give so much credence. The Qureshi were the tribe of the “Prophet” Muhammad, and half the swinging dicks in Muhammad land claim to be descended from them. Liars all.

turned out to be a degreed computer programmer raised in comfortable circumstances. A week before, the Obama administration had re-floated the idea that “violent extremists” are fueled by poverty and exclusion, a moronic, Marxist inspired, and easily debunked trope that has been around since Dubya.

Since I was a child, I’ve loved antiquity. However, I remember many of my classmates hating those museum field trips. This, though, is a bit much

ISIS took a break from releasing snuff films to putting out a video of the lads having a blast smashing statues from Ancient Assyria.

Nothing to do with Islam, of course. Bangladeshi-American atheist blogger Avijit Roy’s wife, Rafida Ahmed Banna, who survived, but lost a finger.

In Dhaka, a Bangladeshi atheist blogger, who also held American citizenship, was hacked to death on the street, with his wife also attacked but surviving. While the White house had nothing to say, a reporter did manage to coax a statement out of Jen Psaki, who was careful to note that at this point the attackers’ motive is unknown.

U.S. State Department spokes-bimbo, Jen Psaki. While lacking empirical evidence, I’d say she’s a genuine ginger, and I bet those hooters are real as well, unlike anything that comes out of her mouth.

The United States government, with zombie FDR nodding approval, decided to regulate the internet under a statute written in 1933. All data packets are equal. Down the road, some will be more equal than others. On the BBC, of all places, a commenter shook his head and said the US government has decided it wants the internet or free. Someone on state owned British media gets economics better than Mr. Obama.

In the same category of unaccountable Federal agencies we have the BATF talking about banning ammunition for the AR-15, a big scary looking rifle that anti-gun legislators have been unable to touch. It’s basically a .22, well .223.

In the United States Congress, the Republican majority, in its strongest position since the 1920s decides that funding DHS, the security super agency that has yet to catch a terrorist, is more important than keeping its promise to the electorate to fight and defund the President’s unilateral amnesty for illegal immigrants.

The president and functionaries of the regime, I’m sorry, government, natter on about “Climate Change,” (Nee Global Warming; isn’t it nice to see her all grown up?) as a foot of snow falls in Alabama.

In other times, people looked to the heavens for signs and portents of evil days to come.

My necromancer didn’t return my texts.

We have the United Sates, guarantor of the peace for some seven decades, in a constitutional crisis, a centuries old civilization conflict bathing vast areas in blood, the ancient nations of Europe suborned by Islamic fifth columns, and much more than I need go into here.

What is to come?

I have no idea, the best minds of our time are trying to determine the color of THE DRESS.

“College Wins US Debate Championship By Repeating the N-Word Over and Over, Speaking Incomprehensibly”

This particular bit of progressive nonsense was brought to my attention by WeaselZipppers, a right blog that can be counted on to put forth the most egregious outrages of Progressives, Leftists, Democrats, Islam, and the Obama administration
I enjoy agenda sites, but check things out. Here, Zippers links to a site called Pundit Press, which has further links to an Atlantic story with this headline and sub header:

Hacking Traditional College Debate’s White-Privilege Problem

“Minority participants aren’t just debating resolutions—they’re challenging the terms of the debate itself.”

Speaking truth to power or something.

The Tyson winners

“On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities.”

.

It appears that the Atlantic writer has no experience in debate, or training in rhetoric. “Premise” Is defined as “a previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion.”

No conclusions or inferences were made. The Towson students simply changed the subject. The proceedings then went in an unusual direction:

“Over four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like “nigga authenticity” and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the traditional timed format. At one point during Lee’s rebuttal, the clock ran out but he refused to yield the floor. “Fuck the time!””

“Fuck the time!”

I rather like that. Good song title or t-shirt meme.

The Atlantic is somewhat reticent in describing the flavor of the debaters’ language and thrust of their rhetoric. Pundit Press is more forthcoming and offers some transcription. The transcription is accurate as far as it would be possible to transcribe this kind of speech, if such it is. (A short video link here, and the entire session, here)

“Uh, man’s sole “jabringing” object disfigure religion trauma and nubs, uh, the, inside the trauma of representation that turns into the black child devouring and identifying with the stories and into the white culture brought up, uh, de de de de de, dink, and add subjectively like a white man, the black man!”

I’m stumped by “jabringing” as the only search result leads back to this article.

A “ jabring” is apparently a breed of cat and maybe a word in Swedish.

And this:

“When the n*****, uh, sees these pains and suffering that he can only, uh, envision himself that he, uh, does not see another n***** that he, uh, can feel sympathy for or embrace, but rather, uh, that, a-bluh, that that otherness gets obliterated.”

I thought I could follow this, but came up short. ”Otherness” is bad,we’re often told, so the speaker should be happy that it is obliterated, but the tone indicates otherwise. Perhaps an undigested bit of Edward Said in an otherwise unidentifiable spew. The passage is not coherent enough to be termed a rant.

As one would expect, comments express outrage at falling, or non-existent standards, ghetto trash talk and the Third Worldization of America,

As for me, I’m not so hard on these kids.

I get what they are doing. I was a high school debater, eventually captain of the team.

And I was crap.

We had intramural debates, and those we called “Oxford Style” full on snark, sarcasm, vilification of opponents, a lot of humorous nastiness, with the audience awarding victory. I did quite well at those. It was basically verbal bullying, elevated above the playground variety by elegant terms of phrase, but just as vicious.

Interscholastic debating, under the aegis of the association to which we belonged, went on throughout the year on a single topic. A thick briefing book was issued and participants were enjoined to learn the basics, and go on to their own research.

Me getting my ass handed to me at a regional debate, University of New Hampshire, 1965

I never did because I was bone idle, and my crew was a similar bunch of no accounts, whom I made no effort to whip into shape. So, while we often got high marks for delivery, we were marked down for everything else.

Now, we had well developed vocabularies and rhetorical technique, and even some degree of oracular artistry, but our basic skill was the same as that deployed by these Towson kids:

Bullshit

The difference was, of course, that we were not rewarded for it. Not only did we bring home no trophies, but the headmaster made sure I was left out of the yearbook picture.

Some comments express concern for the debaters, in that these synthetic accolades set them up for failure in later life. I’m not so sure in their particular cases. The articles give no information on their fields of study, but even if their degrees are insubstantial, their notoriety should help, and I expect places will be found for hem in government, NGOs, or even progressively oriented corporations.

One has to remember that these young people are outstanding in their milieu. Those who are not, but whose education reflects the same kind of standard, will not have much to recommend them. This is one more example of the endless bigotry of low expectations, and the accommodation, and even celebration, of a culture that does not respect learning. Any who aspire to emulate the Towson debaters may have gone to college, but they are in the same trap as are others who eschew schooling to become rappers or athletes.

Not everyone can; most cannot.

The Atlantic quotes academics finding nothing wrong in all this, and who, indeed, celebrate it. These are the real villains of the piece. They have their tenure, but those schooled under their ideas will be lucky to have any kind of job.

In the end, these kids are right. There are white people keeping them down,

While much of American made television and film is filled with endless anti-male, anti – christian, and, dare I say it anti white –sentiments(See “White House down.” Better yet, don’t) Science fiction seems to feel freer to express sentiments not acceptable in mainstream Hollywood drama or comedy.

Misfits stay one step ahead of a Government that only wants to help.

2002’s “Firefly” was a space opera western in which liberty living losers in a war against an all powerful “Alliance” roam the fringes of humanity’s new home in another galaxy. The Alliance governed “Core” is clean, perfect, and monstrously oppressive. Its all pervading order and surveillance seem prescient in view of today’s data seizure revelations(Well, not revelations to me, or those who conceived this series). A good deal of their semi-criminal activity involves avoiding revenue collectors. Nobody’s perfect: there is one episode in which a colony of Christian fundamentalists decide to burn a psychic crew member as a witch. Islam doesn’t seem to have made the the extraterrestrial jump.

Dramatic ending to Season One: A refugee, relieved to be sheltered by the US military, finds that all is not well.

Later in the decade, “Jericho,” while positing an “evil corporation” of the Halliburton type as responsible for the nuclear decapitation of the American republic, then goes on to show hardworking, god fearing small town Americans defending themselves, and the Constitution, with firearms they know well how to use. DeToqueville’s observation of the American character as both individual and associational is clear and consistent throughout the series.

The Second Massachusetts resistance regiment in the current “Falling Skies “ is an unsubtle and proud reference to the original Minutemen. Nationwide authority has been taken out in the initial stage of the alien invasion. It falls to citizen soldiers to carry on the fight. While it is hard to imagine the city of “Shelter in place” actually taking such action, it is cheering that someone writes scripts that find the idea inspiring. At the end of the last season, the 2nd Mass bailed out of an authoritarian non-constitutional restored government to fight the aliens on its own. Given the USA’s difficulties in Afghanistan, “Falling Skies” might also be seen as making a point on the power of assymetrical warfare

Plenty fo guns, and an ongoing Starwars bar scene – with hookers!

Yes, the bad guys in “Revolution” are a militia, but the rebels fight to restore the Constitution and are willing to die for the Stars and Stripes. “Defiance,” while pushing a “Coexist” message of “Why can’t we all get along,” after alien invasions, also shows a healthy respect for self defense and entrepreneurship, with one important character the unashamed female owner of a thriving bar and brothel. Social conservatives might find this a left libertine thread, but it appears to me to be pure libertarian.

Isolated group fighting off hordes of, um, “savages.” Is this racist, or something?

And then there is “Walking Dead.” Pure atomistic survival. The one authority re-established after the fall of the old order, the Governor, is pure evil. Once again, it takes families and small groups – with guns – to resist.

I don’t know whether there is a conscious resistance in Hollywood, or writers and producers simply cannot ignore the fact that warmed over 60s leftism doesn’t sell outside of Sundance, but there is an audience for values traditionally seen as American.

Slamet Riyadi, Solo's main street. The city moves at a slower pace than larger cities nearby. The quiet heart of old Java.

Here's the guy. Pretty tastless of me to put it up, right? Well, tastelessnespales in the face of moral cowardice. The daily outrages, 10 dead here, 30 there, these are real people, as is this man, as much a victim of a vicious and death worshipping ideology as the people he attacked. Churches burned, mosques bombed( by other Muslims, with Shia and Ahmadiiah, as well as the occasional moderate Sunni cleric taking the hit from the more pious). Buddhist monks, and children, beheaded in Thailand, cross border shoppers bombed there too, beer drinkers executed in Nigeria, and on and on…all real people. So have a look at it once in awhile to remember who these people are, and what happened to them. Tastelessness is nothing in the face of this holocaust. I like Solo. This pisses me off, so I put the pic up. Deal with it.

Solo, or its formal name Surakarta, the seat of an ancient sultanate, is a center of highly refined Javanese culture epitomized in its batik, court ceremonies, dance and gamelan music.

Less visited than its better known neighbor, Jogjakarta, it is quiet place with good accommodation, excellent shopping without the touts and traffic of Jogya, accessible by domestic air lines, with Silkair coming in from Singapore. Tourism will not be enhanced by the latest outrage in “moderate“ Indonesia, a poor omen for success in the country’s drive to improve arrivals numbers, 7.2 million in 2010, compared to 12.6 for tiny neighbor Singapore.

Solo is also the birth place of Abu Bakar Basyir, radical Islamist and convicted, although lightly sentenced, terrorist mastermind. In Solo, the cultural civil war between syncretistic Hindu-Islamic Javanese culture and Wahabiism rages just below the surface. The historic tendency of the Javanese toward syncretism and openness to different spiritual beliefs also resulted in a large Christan population, Now there are jihadis to attack them.

Egypt’s and Tunisia’s tourist industries have been ruined, and will most likely never rebound as they become shariah dominated Islamic republics. This could be Indonesia’s fate as well. Jihad is bad for business,

The ubiquity of cell phones here, and lax policing procedures means that a pic of the dead bomber is already viral. He looks like an offal stand in a wet market, No “suspected” about it.

The story goes on: “Religious tensions still bubble near the surface in the officially secular nation.” “Bubble” is a rather weak verb in this context.

“Officially secular”…yes, but not in a sense that nations like the US or France might recognize. The country has a Ministry of Religion, which, given the demography concerns itself mostly with Islamic affairs, but does allocate some funding to other beliefs. Domestic airliners, along with the emergency instructions and barf bag, have prayer cards for the major religions in the seat pockets, just the thing for white knuckle fliers,

In Indonesia, religion trumps everything , and one religion trumps all others.

And… “Religious conflicts flared up between Muslims and Christians in Maluku and Sulawesi, in the eastern part of the sprawling archipelago, following the overthrow of former President Suharto in 1998.”

This is a case where “religious conflict,” rather than being the value neutral and history shunning whitewash it usually is, may be an appropriate term, at least in terms of the inception of the conflicts, which were actually large scale regional civil wars. Both sudden explosions, over perceived slights that quickly spread and dragged on for years. However, in both areas was only the Muslim side that brought in arms and fighters from outside, with the indifference, if not outright collusion of the security forces, To my knowledge, no clear journalistic account, in any language, has been written for either conflict. At the time, local media withdrew and foreigners were banned. Despite widespread lawlessness, and the deaths of thousands, only three people ever prosecuted, Christians Fabianus Tibo, Dominggus da Silva, and Marinus Riwu, all executed in 2001. No one, Christian or Muslim was ever charged in the Maluku war.

Instead, academics, religious leaders and government actors spoke of “horizontal conflict,” convened conferences and hammered out intercommunal agreements. This is the Indonesian way, where confrontation is avoided, and consensus, regardless of justice, is valued above everything else. That is, until tempers rise too far. “Amuck” after all is a Malay word(for non- Indonesian readers, the Indonesian language is based on the Riau-Johore dialect of
Malay.) This, as much as political indebtedness to Islamic parties, may be at the heart of President Yudhyonos’s passivity in the face of rising Islamist agitation and violence.

In its story, the Jakarta Globe quotes police sources as saying the attack may be linked to recent violence in Ambon.

Note that once again, a “clash“ is Muslims attacking Christians, just as this is usually described wherever it may be, Egypt, Nigeria, or Indonesia, among others,

Since the end of the wars in Maluku and Sulawesi almost ten years ago, I would challenge anyone to find an instance of a Christian initiated “clash” in Indonesia; If nothing else, those “conflicts” taught the minority that they are not going to win, even in areas where they have numerical equality, or even superiority.

Another Globe story quotes Christian and Muslim clerics as warning against a plot to stir up “conflict.“

Here in microcosm, is Indonesia’s quandary, and the world’s, in confronting Islamist extremism. A refusal to look at the core texts of Islam, not the various islams practiced in different forms across continents, but the texts whose exact words motivate terrorists and jihadi fighters, results in logical fallacies, x-factor searches for conspiracies, leading to abject failure in defending the societies attacked.s

Just as is standard procedure in the Us and Europe, when a “lone wolf” jihadi is caught, or acts,, we are told that he or she is not part of a network, as if that is reassuring, and police and press speculate as to motive.

Motive? I posit Islam.

“When the sacred months are over, slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them and lie in ambush everywhere for them.”

…but buns are also a problem for Supervisor Scott Wiener(Stonefree: Who is the patron saint of headline writers anyway? I’d offer up a prayer of thanks and write this one: “Wiener Says to Wrap Weenies”), as this story for SFGate relates:

San Francisco, September 7, 2011 — “San Francisco will once again be the butt (Stonefree: kudos to Gate writer Rachel Gordon)of national ridicule – or a beacon of freedom of expression – depending on your point of view. The latest issue?

to put something under their bottoms if they take a seat in public and to cover up when they’re in a restaurant…”

When I was a kid if you wanted to see naked women, you went to the Follies on Third Street. Locker rooms for naked men.

As for tolerance, if I were so foolish as to show my wrinkled bum in public in the City of St. Francis, I would suffer snickers at worst, but a bumper sticker for a Republican candidate would invite near certain vandalism. I visit SF now and then, and enjoy it, but I don’t miss the city, even after spending more than twenty years there. Just before I left for good some ten years ago, I ran my last Bay to Breakers. There were some naked guys at the start line, and they were clearly, um, pleased to be naked. It gets a bit much.

Although not that much in most cases. Consider coverage of last June’s naked bike ride in SF, by Zombie, a trenchant observer of Bay Area weirdness. Without actually counting( but I’m pretty good at estimating and quantitative thinking) the score was: schlongs,1; teenies, around 30. And as to my personal preference, none at all; but hey, it’s San Francisco.

.
The story’s mention of Supervisor Wiener leads me to digress a bit, but still on the subject of man-wurst, you have to feel a bit sorry for Rep. Anthony Weiner. Early on his was faced with a difficult choice, The German diphthong “ei” is pronounced “eye,” Hence, it’s Barbara Streye-sand, not Stree-sand. Yet some choose the long “e” sound, although rendered “ie” in German, as in people named Stein pronouncing their name “Steen.”

So, as a lad the unfortunate congressman was faced with the choice of being either whiny, or a weenie. Events proved him to be both, but he will be remembered for the latter. As for the Supervisor, I can see his reelection slogan, given his strong stand on this issue: “Wiener’s no Weenie!” This would no doubt give his opponents the willies.

Why does someone name child after a historic British coal port( the Bounty was a refitted Bristol collier: just had to throw that in. I know a lot of stuff), particularly someone named Sarah, with its Biblical resonance of patience and hope, a name much favored in in colonial America, and parenthetically, the name of a beloved grandaunt of mine?

If her parents had continued with the same theme, perhaps they would have named Trig and Track Weymouth and Dartmouth. Kinda classy, eh? As to Willow and Piper, I’m out of ideas here. Cardiff seems a bit butch, and Southhampton pretentious.

This is a good point to say that I am not going after Ms Palin here. The governor has had more than her hare of scurrilous ad hominem attacks, as any fair minded person would note, regardless of one’s opinion of her politics.

Rather, Bristol’s name is a prominent example of a phenomenon that has irked me for decades, Made up names with no etymology that suddenly appear, so that suddenly every other child you meet bears them..

In the 80s there was Brittany, and I wondered where her sister Normandy might be. Then came Brie, who surely merited two stalwart brothers, Roquefort and Camembert. Good names for musketeers.

And first came Kimberley. If you are going to name your daughter for a South African gold field, why not go on? Siblings might be Durban for a boy, and Pretoria for his sister. The was a Nicholson movie in the 80s( Possibly “Heartburn”), wherein Jack recounts some of his less well advised flings to a woman he is getting to know. When he mentions a “Kimberley,” his date raises her eyebrows and Jack explains, “She was one of the early Kimberleys,” Kimberley then already a cynosure( I’ve been waiting ever so long to stick “cynosure,” in somewhere, maybe since high school.) for vapid, very young, and probably blonde.

My antipathy for this kind of name, may spring in part from my Catholic upbringing. Catholics had proper names – the names of saints, even if some, like Philomena and Christoper, turned out never to have existed. Rich proddies, of the old Anglo ascendancy we still resented, had last names for first names, like Everett and Eliot. Names from the old testament were mostly for long dead people in American history, although half the Jewish boys we knew seemed to have been named Joshua.

So what’s behind these faddish names from nowhere? Even when I was quite young, I resented signs such as Ye Old Malt Shoppe( I’m not making this up; it was on Mamaroneck Avenue in White Plains, New York) This was America, not “Merrie Englande” and we didn’t need to pretend to be anything other than what we were.

I’m much too lazy to follow this line of inquiry on the internet; someone must have studied it – someone has studied pretty much everything, and instead,prefer to speculate. The names, I think, represent an inchoate longing for a status or history that is perceived as superior to one’s own. An early example of this was in second generation immigrant kids with Anglo names. Everyone knows a Jewish Seymour ( Surely no kin to Lady Jane). I had a fifth grade classmate called Aldrich Carmenini.

In my view the phenomenon is most sadly apparent in names that have become popular in black America since the Civil Rights Era. The parents of Rashads, Maliks, ,and Jamals surely had no knowledge of the Arab slave trade. As to Taneisha, Kenisha, Sheneika and so on, they are categorized as afro-centric, but look at a few newspapers from Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, and you find that they certainly are not African. As for the many names beginning with La, and others with superfluous apostrophes and ending with accents graves(D’vonte ), their origin may be the same fawning reference to Europe as the height of “class” seen in “ye olde.”

This is a pity. I am in the middle of Simon Schama’s “Rough Crossings: the Slaves, the British and the American Revolution,” and reflect as I often have, that no community is more deeply rooted in American history than Black Americans. There would be no shortage of names to reflect this Martin is pretty obvious, but Douglass tells a story, and if Sojourner is a mouthful, Truth would be a lovely name for a girl.

I do wonder if the naming customs I speak of reflect a loss of a sense of place, origin, and continuity, when the past is forgotten, and the future obscure Perhaps I simply fret too much, and in years to come, other generations will be named in memory of the deeds and accomplishments of a host of Bries, Kimberleys, Latoyas and D’Vontes.

And to any Kimberleys and others who might chance upon this: nothing personal. A name is what you make of it.

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